The Narcissist's 2 Secret Powers

When you think of the people skills of a narcissist, chances are you don’t imagine them to be particularly good in the interpersonal department. Perhaps you have an acquaintance you see around town whose self-aggrandizing and egotistical qualities continue to rub you the wrong way. Today, they stop to chat with you and manage to “drop” into the conversation the fact that they just got a promotion at work. You wonder how such an annoying and unlikeable person could have the ability to make such a favorable impression on the powers that be.

For the most part, people high in narcissism don’t actually have that much luck in their relationships, at least according to research on the long-term prospects for their ability to retain a partner after the initial glow wears off. In other domains of life, though, they could actually become quite successful and, like your acquaintance, even progress up the career ladder.

The Paradox of the Narcissist’s Success

According to Hong Kong Baptist University’s Erica Xu and colleagues (2022), although narcissism is generally thought of as “socially problematic,” people high in this quality “are also portrayed as having the glamour to attract people.” They can, paradoxically, “have the power to inspire people and mysteriously influence them,” leading them to become “leaders across different sectors of society, and around the world and throughout history” (pp. 783–784). When you think about this statement, you might be very likely to agree based on your own musings regarding the personalities of some political leaders.

Xu and her colleagues decided to plunge into this paradoxical state of affairs by devising two studies that would allow them to tease apart the factors that could lead at least some narcissists to avoid the taint of their unpleasant personal qualities and gain this mysterious power.

As theoretical background to the research, the Hong Kong researchers rely not on a deep psychodynamic orientation but instead draw from what’s called a social constructivist view of personality. This approach maintains that your personality is, as the term implies, “constructed” by the way that others view you. People look at your behavior and, from that evidence, make inferences about the qualities within you that produced that behavior. Nothing very complicated is required, within this view, to explain why other people see narcissists as having self-centered and aggrandizing qualities. It’s just that narcissists behave that way.

Moving on to understanding what makes narcissists paradoxically popular, Xu et al. proposed that the first component involves power dependence. If other people depend on an individual, that individual will be more likely to gain social acceptance. If you need that person to accomplish your own goals, then it’s likely you’ll want to include that person in your group.

The second piece to understanding the narcissist’s popularity, according to the researchers, is expertise. A person who is really good at their job not only helps guarantee the success of the group but also “can offer valuable knowledge, skills, and resources to other team members” (p. 785).

Think about someone who, though highly narcissistic, is extremely useful in being able to teach you a skill that you want to acquire. Maybe you’re taking a class to polish up your skills in your favorite hobby. The teacher’s constant self-aggrandizing comments aggravate you to no end, but it’s clear that they have tremendous expertise in this particular domain. As it turns out, you even go so far as to invite the teacher to have lunch with you and your fellow students just to be able to pick their brain that much more.

Manipulating the Two Pieces of the Narcissism Paradox

The narcissists who are able to wield their power over others, the Hong Kong researchers argue, are the ones with this high level of desirable expertise. The combination of expertise and power dependency, as Xu et al. maintain, can override the ordinary distaste that people feel for individuals who constantly demand admiration and attention.

Across two field studies, Xu and her collaborators conducted time-lagged studies, each one month apart, using employee teams at two different call centers located in China. Workgroups in these organizations completed both self-report measures on their own levels of narcissism as well as ratings of the qualities of the members of their workgroups.

Each member of the workgroup rated each other’s expertise in the aspects of the job needed for competence. Participants also completed measures of their own interdependence on each other with items such as “Our group members ‘sink or swim’ together.” In the first study, ostracism was used as the dependent measure; the second study expanded the outcome measures to social inclusion and popularity.

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The advantage of this field method was that the research team could obtain all but the narcissism scores using ratings provided by the workgroup members of each other. For example, in the ostracism measure, participants rated their groupmates on items such as “At work, I treated [X] as if he/she wasn’t there.”

Each group member received their ostracism score on the basis of the average ratings provided by everyone else. Similarly, in rating popularity, group members rated each other with items such as “This person is viewed fondly.”

Turning to the results, as the authors predicted, the two factors of expertise and group goal interdependence combined to influence the popularity and inclusion of participants varying in narcissism. Individuals high in narcissism who were regarded as having expertise in their job tasks managed to overcome the otherwise negative impact of their personalities on both inclusion and ostracism. In the words of the authors, “For front-line employees, having a narcissistic personality may not constitute a liability” (p. 795).

How to Get Away From the Narcissist’s Strong Grip

It’s clear, then, that people high in narcissism can manage to find ways both to ingratiate and dominate others despite their tendency to be insufferable. As long as they have skills that other people want and need, they will climb up whatever ladder is set in front of them.

Thinking back on your acquaintance with the recent job promotion, you can now understand how qualities that would ordinarily lead this person to be socially isolated instead have made them invaluable to their organization. In fact, thinking too about that teacher, isn’t your need to learn what they know the driving force behind your willingness to put up with their arrogance?

Taking a social constructivist approach to personality becomes helpful, then, not just as a theoretical model but also as a way to understand some of the more baffling features of the narcissist’s ascendancy. They clearly do something right in terms of gaining expertise, but they also are able to parlay those skills in such a way that they create a need in others to know what they know. Without this combination, as the Hong Kong study shows, the narcissist remains isolated and unpopular.

To sum up, when it comes to dealing with a narcissist, these findings provide you with some answers as well as strategies. If you can take what you need from this individual’s toolkit without becoming exploited yourself, you can gain vital skills without becoming drawn into their unsavory power games.

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